The current status of the R language, and lessons from an NSF POSE grant for the data.table package.
🔅 data.table is an extremely popular R package for dataset manipulation and summarizing
🔅 NSF Grant 1005559 (Pathways to Open-Source Ecosystems)
“Supports the facilitation, creation and growth of open-source ecosystems for the creation of new technology solutions.”
🔅 My role: community building, documentation and education, governance and sustainability
(Ranked #14 in 2025; near-tie with e.g. Perl, SQL, PHP, Matlab)
🔅 Packages for specific statistical models
🔅 Readable and beginner-friendly data wrangling with the tidyverse
🔅 Speedy in-memory data manipulation with data.table
🔅 Communities of domain-specific packages
🔅 R is maintained by the R Core Group, a team of 20 developers…
… none of these people are paid for their work.
🔅 Large donations to the R Foundation have supported R Core in the past.
🔅 The R Contributor Working Group is helping build a Contributor Community
🔅 The tidyverse and tidymodels sets are maintained by paid developers at Posit, PBC.
🔅 Sometimes, funding can come from:
… but almost all of what you use is made by community members with no compensation.
#rstats community🔅 Access to social connections with other users
→ ⛅ bsky.app/profile/rdatatable.bsky.social
→ 🦣 fosstodon.org/@r_data_table
→ linkedin.com/company/data-table-community/
🔅 Conferences and meetups (including online) are thriving
→ Hex stickers - find me!
🔅 Blogs, tutorials, and online textbooks
🔅 Translation projects.
🔅 Open-source work needs professional recognition
→ Did you cite EVERY package you used in your most recent paper?
→ Do you vote for awards/tenure/promotions for people who develop open-source code?
data.table project!